iLearn at St. Joseph's Schofields

At St. Joseph’s we have been using the iPads throughout the day for various learning activities across Key Learning Areas.

During English reading groups to support our persuasive text focus the children have used Pic Collage to create posters promoting the St. Joseph’s community to new families who are currently enrolling in our school community. 

Students have used the Felt app to represent their favourite part of an ipick book that they are currently reading. Other students are then given an opportunity to guess each other’s felt creations. Students have also made book trailers using iMovie incorporating other apps within their movies e.g. a felt board images.

In Religion, the teachers and students created a book trailer summarising a bible story into a few key words, keeping the message of the biblical story. This allowed the children to gain a deeper understanding of the story; the children were engaged in the reading and viewing of the text.

During HSIE the children have created a product to advertise their local community. The students have created imovies, telegamis, billboard posters and magazine using pic collage.

We have tried to make the experience as an open-ended activity with very little structure in how to present or go about making their presentations and providing support or scaffold as required. In doing this, the children have produced work that has truly impressed us and they have been far beyond what we imagined they would be producing and their creativity has been truly inspiring.

We have experienced a few challenges and hurdles during the initial setup phase. It was important to set clear expectations and rules around transporting ipads to and from school, use of ipads in the classroom and the appropriate times to be on the device during class time. Eg not during teacher instruction. We continue to work on establishing a workflow and being able to share this with the teachers. We are currently working on children creating folders in google drive and sharing those folders with the teachers.

Overall having the i-pads in the classroom had enabled the students to approach tasks in a different way and enabled them to exercise their creativity. The iPads have been very helpful in enabling us to change our paradigm about teaching text and has provided opportunities for students to produce multimodal texts as we familiarise ourselves with the new English syllabus.

The magic school bus goes under the ocean Felt picture

Religion iMovie

Willy the Wimp iMovie Book Trailer